SOLACE

Synopsis

Soraya, an astro-geologist, is in the process of analyzing a mysterious glowing crystal she's found. When her ship starts acting strangely, she'll realize that the crystal wasn't the only thing she brought aboard.

We wanted to create a gritty-looking short film with a story full of suspense. In terms of suspense, there is no better setting than in deep space within an empty space ship, with no escape and no connection to the outside world. 

Soraya the "Astro-geologist"

Soraya is a geo-astronaut researching rocks to find a new energy source out in deep space.

In the early exploration of the character we gave a bulkier suit as a form of protection from the rocks she would constantly be around while collecting samples in space as well as a mechanical arm to help her in space as well as trying to incorporate the scientist aspect of her character into her design with lab coats but realized baggy loose clothes weren't very practical in space and made the character design very cluttered so we stripped her down to a more sleek sci-fi space suit. 

The hair simulation was one of the last challenges we faced during the project. At first we thought it was as simple as turning on the simulation but we soon came to realize how complicated the process was especially using Xgen core which not alot of people knew how to use.

Connecting the hair to the head had issues where Xgen nodes would get confused and be attached to the wrong mesh causing all sorts of errors. Then was the settings of the hair, if the motion of the character was to much they hair would clip or fly around the screen like mad. And after all this for some reason the xgen wasn’t moving during the render. That’s when we remembered Jefferson telling us to import the scene into the xgen file to get it to work, which we were stubborn about but had to give in to at the end. After doing that and learning to cache the hair the render of the character went really smoothly into completion

Alien Mother

It took a lot of work coming up with an alien design that was both iconic and original while keeping with the art style of our film. We knew from the get go we wanted our creature to be able to “transform” in some way from scary to cute or at the very least less threatening, this brought additional challenges as we also had to design a cute baby form for the creature. To this end we tried every single body type we could to find the right fit, from humanoid to quadruped to something in between. In the choose this creature with a large head and many eyes and went from there. 

After choosing the body type we decided to make it as creepy as possible. It’s large head became a kind of tail it could emote with and its legs became crab like. With the current design in mind we felt that the alien was still a bit to cute and needed one last tweak before it was ready to step aboard the ship.

To fully bring our alien to life we needed to add enough detail to model it with so we went to where our last piece of reference led us to, the sea.

We used the shell of a giant isopod and the skin patterns of a crab. It’s mouth would look very goofy if it opened like a human so we switched it to a predator style mouth. Since our alien was gonna be in space we made it have the protective eyelid that birds have when flying to protect its eyes. We also pushed the eye further by making it like an ammonite. Its tongue would also follow suite mimicking the kind of structure tadpole tail has.

Having the design go through so many changes also meant that it took many attempts to reach the point where the model looked decent. Translating the character from concept art to model was not easy, we had to interpret and add many details ourselves until we finally reached the final outcome.

Alien Baby

Baby Alien, the main goal of Mother Alien; revealed near the end of the story.

To sell the sense of a newborn onto this baby alien, we had it constantly struggle trying to lift itself up and walk having its legs wobble about and sometimes even having it tripping itself. We also gave it a pinch of curiosity with how it taps the glass in front staring deep into what’s in front at the moment.

Environment

Environment Style Guide

The main room is a very important set piece of the film since most of the film would be set inside it. We considered many difference designs for the room but we ended up with what is essentially a circle so that Soraya can go on a little “adventure” around her room interacting with all props we’ve set up for her. 

These props needed special care as they are the ones that Soraya interacts with throughout the film. We make all of the tables look similar to give it a “modular” look of a space ship that could be customized to its users needs and in this case a multitude of containments used to study the rocks with.

An important prop in the room to really sell that Soraya has been studying and collecting a multitudes of rare and unique stones. We designed it to purposely resemble the capsule Soraya uses to tie the designs together

Space Ship

In the beginning we were experimented with designing ships and space station trying to get it to match the aesthetic and feel of the astronaut. The reason why we went for a shape ship was that the space station was just to large while the setting of our film was gonna be small and claustrophobic. Also if a space space station seemed like a place for many people so it would be weird to only have a single person on the entire base

Color Script

Last but not least,